A Categorically New Kind of Museum Library Opens Down Under

Photo by Jesse Hunniford/Museum of Old and New Art

A two-level library at the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Tasmania, now holds the personal collection of its founder, David Walsh.

When David Walsh was seven years old, his library card was his “best friend.” Growing up in Glenorchy, Tasmania, near Hobart, he haunted the local two-room library, where most children were allowed to borrow two books at a time. Walsh was allowed six and made a serious attempt to read every book he brought home—and, eventually, every book in the library.

Decades later, Walsh, a professional gambler and the founder of Tasmania’s famously unconventional Museum of Old and New Art (Mona), has built a library of his own. Phrontisterion, which opened at Mona in June, holds some 50,000 books, maps, manuscripts, and other items. Ten years in the making, it sits beneath Elektra, Anselm Kiefer’s colossal inverted-ziggurat amphitheater, and is connected to the rest of the museum by tunnels through the sandstone.

Phrontisterion is not a conventional museum library. Visitors are encouraged to browse, pick up books, read, study, and work. Researchers, academics, and school groups are welcome, too. There are treasures aplenty: a 1623 Shakespeare First Folio (one of the two copies in Australia); a first edition of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita; signed books by Umberto Eco, J. G. Ballard, and Hunter S. Thompson; handwritten documents by Walt Whitman, Gustave Flaubert, Albert Einstein, and Isaac Newton; plus David Bowie’s handwritten lyrics for “Starman.” (There’s even a collection of Bowie’s favorite books—Walsh said he’s a big fan.)

Some of the humbler volumes are equally revealing. Walsh has stocked a children’s section partly with books belonging to his daughters and is displaying books from his own childhood. In the main library, there’s a copy of Richard Epstein’s The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic, a book Walsh discovered at the State Library of Tasmania in 1981. It transformed his understanding of risk and ultimately helped lead to the gambling fortune that funded Mona. “Without Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic,” Walsh has written, “there’s a good chance that there’d be no Mona and no library.”

Photo by Jesse Hunniford/Museum of Old and New Art

Walsh’s David Bowie collection includes the original, handwritten lyrics to “Starman.”

Photo by Jesse Hunniford/Museum of Old and New Art

The children’s library in Phrontisterion.

Photo by Jesse Hunniford/Museum of Old and New Art

The exterior of Phrontisterion.

Photo by Jesse Hunniford/Museum of Old and New Art

Visitors can interact with "digital doubles" of rare books at Phrontisterion.

Phrontisterion’s greatest departure from library tradition may be what’s missing: call numbers.

“We don’t have Dewey. We have the O,” Mona proclaims. The “O” is the museum’s proprietary digital system, originally developed to replace wall labels in its galleries. In Phrontisterion, it also replaces the fixed order of a conventional library. Cameras repeatedly photograph the shelves, allowing the system to recognize and locate individual books. If a visitor puts a book back somewhere else, that’s fine: the O can find it again.

That freedom allows the librarians to arrange books by theme, association, aesthetics, or whim—the sex books, for example, are arranged by color.

Walsh sees this as more than an amusing upgrade to the Dewey Decimal system. “Dewey is a 150-year-old system dominant in a world where every facet of engagement changes in a timescale of years or months,” Walsh explained. “It has been phenomenally useful, and it still has its place, but I want to enable librarians to have the same freedom as curators—I want them to be curators.”

It’s an intriguing inversion of the conventional museum library, where books serve as research infrastructure for the objects. At Phrontisterion, the books are curatable objects. Technology takes care of finding them, freeing the humans to decide what they might mean next to each other.

Even the library’s somewhat forbidding name has a bit of a wink attached. “Phrontisterion” derives from Aristophanes’s Clouds, the ancient Greek satire that lampoons Socrates and the intellectual pretensions of Athens. In the play, the Phrontisterion is Socrates’s “thinkery,” a disreputable school where the debt-ridden Strepsiades hopes to learn the rhetorical tricks necessary to escape his creditors. This Tasmanian “thinkery,” however, is open to everyone.

For all the irreverence, Walsh takes books seriously. His collection has grown according to his shifting interests, supplemented by purchases intended to strengthen particular areas and by acquisitions made by Mona’s librarians. It includes items on architecture, mathematics, and ancient Egypt, but also wine, gambling, religion, sex, and death. “This library isn’t about books I’ve read,” Walsh said. “It’s about books I might want to read. It’s what I don’t know that has dominion over me.”

His collecting has also brought objects to Tasmania more readily encountered in the libraries and museums of Europe and North America. Asked whether he consciously wanted to bring such treasures to locals who might otherwise have to travel thousands of miles to see them, Walsh turned the premise around: “I want to bring objects to Tasmania that non-Tasmanians will travel thousands of miles to see.”

Perhaps the Phrontisterion’s most important experiment is whether all those treasures can inspire curiosity in an age of distraction and disengagement. Walsh remembers libraries as places of opportunity, available even to a child without much money or access to museums. “Books induced awe in me as a child, and that feeling has not diminished,” he said. “One of the parameters by which I’ll measure the success of Phrontisterion is whether some of our visitors have that same feeling.”